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Pierce writes: "Anyone who was listening to Barack Obama and thought they heard FDR was tuned into his own private frequencies. Handed an economic catastrophe a month before his election, and then governing through the worst of it in the early days of his administration, he sought consensus because that's the most basic instinct in him, and, alas, consensus was that claque of Wall Street Magi whom he brought aboard."

Has Obama actually walked away from his campaign promises? (photo: Jason Reed/Reuters)
Has Obama actually walked away from his campaign promises? (photo: Jason Reed/Reuters)



The Predictable Presidency

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

23 February 12

 

ver this past weekend,I had some fun hosting a book salon over at the Firedoglake site with Thomas Frank on the topic of his new book, Pity The Billionaire. As you can see, the dialogue got a little spirited when the topic of the president came up. Bear in mind, I have my own problems with the way business has been done by this administration over the past three years. Rahm Emanuel never should have been let near the White House, and that passel of Wall Street people never should have been let near the nation's fiscal policy until some of their old lunch buddies had done some serious time.

This president has attached himself too closely to the Bush Administration's policies on terror. His signature health-care law is so full of compromises, duct tape, thumbtacks, and rubber bands, and chewing gum that it's vulnerable to 100 different attacks from 110 different directions. He should not have needed kids in drum circles halfway through his presidency to tell him who his real enemies were. But the fact is, I'm not surprised by any of this. To me, anyway, Barack Obama is pretty much the conciliationist Democratic centrist that I knew I was voting for back in 2008.

(There was only one person back then who looked as though he might walk the whole progressive walk on income inequality and the rising power of oligarchy in the country, and that was John Edwards, and what a field of buttercups that administration would have turned out to be. Yoicks.)

Recently, in a spate of writing on the topic of how the administration has done its business, there seems to be a rising sense that the president underrated the true monomaniacal nature of this opposition while simultaneously overrating both our desire to be together and his own ability to get us there. James Fallows wrote that, "If Obama really thought that America had moved past partisan division, then he was too innocent for the job." All I can say to those folks is, well, welcome to the boat, y'all. Beer's in the cooler.

The people I don't understand are the people who pronounce themselves "betrayed" by what has happened since the president was elected. As hard a political lesson as this is to learn, the politicians we vote for are under no obligation to be who we think they should be. Nine times out of 10, anyone who complains that "This isn't the guy I voted for" either wasn't playing close enough attention at the time they held the election, or was really voting for himself by proxy. If we're very, very lucky, circumstances will conspire with dumb luck and enable a politician to deliver unalloyed by compromise maybe 25 percent of what he promised us when he was running.

There was never any doubt that, in a great many instances, Barack Obama was going to accommodate and compromise because that's the way the man's built. He took a dive on telecom immunity in July before he was elected. That should have been a caveat emptor moment for everyone.

While running for his first term as president, on a campaign speech in Columbus, Ohio, FDR said:

"It was the heyday of promoters, sloganeers, mushroom millionaires, opportunists, adventurers of all kinds. In this mad whirl was launched Mr. Hoover's campaign. Perhaps foreseeing it, a shrewd man from New England, while in the cool detachment of the Dakota hills, on a narrow slip of paper wrote the historic words, 'I do not choose to run.'"

I can't recall Barack Obama's ever saying anything that direct or harsh in 2008, either about the incumbent, or about the situation in which the incumbent was handing over the country to him. (I don't recall him saying anything that harsh and direct about anything or anyone, ever.) The moment of that election desperately needed - hell, demanded - an FDR, but there was no FDR on offer. Anyone who was listening to Barack Obama and thought they heard FDR was tuned into his own private frequencies. Handed an economic catastrophe a month before his election, and then governing through the worst of it in the early days of his administration, he sought consensus because that's the most basic instinct in him, and, alas, consensus was that claque of Wall Street Magi whom he brought aboard. Not good, but entirely predictable.

So what now? There are some signals that the president is realizing consensus is impossible with an opposition made up primarily of Bible-banging pyromaniacs, and that, anyway, consensus is not always a desirable goal in and of itself. (His reflexive proposal to cut the corporate tax today, however, is not a good sign. He's bidding against Mitt Romney on Romney's home turf, on an issue that will not resonate with any great mass of Democratic voters at all.) His chances of being re-elected are better than they were a year ago, but it's still going to be a long pull up a dirt road to get to 270 electoral votes. Once in that dreary effort, I'd like to hear all the eloquence that made him a star edged with the faintest amount of vitriol, just a dollop of scorn to liven it up. The country deserves that. A little more consensus and we might all go down together.

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